ine. The General
issued orders to board them, when the wind freshing up, and the
English bearing down upon them, they began firing with great and small
arms, and the English returning the fire, they immediately left their
anchors, and run over the bar. The sloop and schooner pursuing them;
and, though they engaged them for an hour and a quarter, they could
not get on board. The Spanish vessels then run up towards the town;
and as they were hulled, and seemed disabled, six half-galleys came
down, and kept firing nine-pounders, but, by reason of the distance,
the shot did not reach the sloop or schooner. That night the General
came to anchor within sight of the castle of St. Augustine, and the
next day sailed for the Matanzas; but, finding no vessel there,
cruised off the bar of St. Augustine, and nothing coming out, the
whole coast being thus alarmed, he returned to Frederica.

There were three ships, and one two-mast vessel lying within the
harbor at the time that the English engaged the sloop and ship.[1]

[Footnote 1: _Annals of Europe_, page 404.]

This summer one of the Georgia boats off Tybee saved a three-mast
vessel which the Spaniards had abandoned, leaving eighteen Englishmen
on board, after having barbarously scuttled her, and choked the pumps,
that the men might sink with the ship; but the boat's men, getting on
board in good time, saved the men and the ship.

It seems that the Creeks, in retaliation of some predatory and
murderous outrages of the Florida outposts, made a descent upon them
in return. This is referred to in the following extract from a letter
of General Oglethorpe to the Duke of Newcastle, dated

Frederica, 12th of December, 1741.

My Lord,

"Toonahowi, the Indian who had the honor of your Grace's protection in
England, with a party of Creek Indians, returned hither from making
an incursion up to the walls of Augustine; near which they took Don
Romualdo Ruiz del Moral, Lieutenant of Spanish horse, and nephew to
the late Governor, and delivered him to me.

"The Governor of Augustine has sent the enclosed letter to me by some
English prisoners; and, the prisoners there, the enclosed petition. On
which I fitted out the vessels, and am going myself, with a detachment
of the regiment, off the bar of Augustine, to demand the prisoners,
and restrain the privateers."

In the early part of the year 1742, the Spaniards formed a design upon
Georgia, on which, from the time of its settlement, t